‘Black Mirror’: Every Episode Ranked

A soldier (Malachi Kirby) is tasked with exterminating sub-human creatures called “roaches,” but a glitch in his microchip implant allows him to be the only one in his group to see the world clearly, exposing a government eugenics program. Michael Kelly plays a military psychologist, who is on the front lines of an argument that PTSD can be wiped out with memory, and by using implants to mask the reality and pain. The relevant episode takes on modern warfare, with a Black Mirror-like test of morality, but there’s almost no sense of character and the viewer is given little reason to care.

Playing out like a crime thriller, Alex Lawther kicks off the chase when his character is seen being blackmailed by hackers. He must carry out their cryptic demands, otherwise they will release damaging information into the world. He soon discovers other equally desperate players in the twisted saga, but not until the end is the uniting thread between them all revealed in devastating fashion. Lawther’s performance stands out and the episode will leave viewers questioning both privacy and humanity in a way that rings familiar to a previous episode in the series listed below, “White Bear,” but its such a nihilistic story that leaves you with no one to root for.

Many fans really disliked this episode. We liked it slightly better than most, as its divisive ending is just so bonkers. A paparazzi photographer (Zazie Beets) stalks an actress (Clara Rugaard) with a secret. But did you guess her secret was that Mazey Day is a werewolf?! Yes, it’s all really dumb, but not unentertainingly dumb. 

Miley Cyrus plays mega pop star Ashley O, who is struggling with her image and artistry. Her aunt (Susan Parfour) views her as a digital entity that she can monetize and assumes control over Ashley’s life and imagery. But when a fan (Angourie Rice) and her sister (Madison Davenport) crack the “limiter” on their AI smart doll “Ashley Too,” a copy of Ashley’s brain capacity, the sisters, along with their now digitally conscious robotic doll, set out on an adventure to help Ashley. The episode is a departure in tone and takes a risk with its ending. (The news tickers in the episode are filled with Easter eggs.)

Season six isn’t anybody’s favorite run of Black Mirror episodes and the opener kicked off the meh-ness. “Joan Is Awful” is about an average woman (Annie Murphy) stunned to find a global streaming service is adapting her life in real time. The “hey look we’re on Netflix while mocking Netflix” meta-ness gets very thick, very fast, and the episode’s worshipful treatment of Salma Hayek as the TV version of Joan feels jarring. “Joan Is Awful” feels like Black Mirror fan servicing itself. 

While far from a great episode, “The Waldo Moment” is considered rather remarkable for its seemingly unbelievable premises predicting the rise of Donald Trump. The story, which aired in 2013, tells of an outsider (Daniel Rigby) who voices a cartoon bear that goes on to win an election by utilizing anti-establishment rhetoric. The human controlled the avatar, named Waldo, with predictive face technology — until the avatar outgrows its handler. Waldo insults voters, who lapp it up because they are sick of the status quo (a tactic was later utilized by Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.) After Trump’s election, along with Brexit, Brooker said he was going to tackle politics less head on, since the climate was moving too quickly.

Black Mirror takes on the true crime documentary genre when a couple (Samuel Blenkin and Myha’la Herrold) visiting the Scottish countryside get pulled into a muuuuuuurder mystery. “Loch Henry” stands out for its unique tone and giving fans an old fashioned folk horror mystery with a bit of The Blair Witch Project thrown in for good measure. 

Led by Andrea Riseborough, “Crocodile” explores how memory, when advanced by technology, can help to solve crimes. The bleak thriller flips gender roles to show what one mother is capable of when her own life is on the line, and displays how the past can come back to haunt the present — a theme Brooker has not shied away from utilizing in some of his most powerfully daunting stories. The role was initially written for a man, until Riseborough asked Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones if she could read for the part, sparking the creator and his executive producer to buck the trope and tell an even more compelling thriller.

Introduced as a “Red Mirror” film — an unnecessary contrivance to indicate a supernatural rather than-tech-themed episode (Charlie, if you’re going to do it, just do it!). This one was divisive, but we liked the retro episode about a sales assistant (Anjana Vasan) who releases a playful demon (future Severus Snape actor Paapa Essiedu) who tries to convince her to commit three murders to prevent the end of the world. With Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes” doing some helpful nostalgic heavy lifting, the episode’s apocalyptic love story climax strikes a wonderfully complex and weirdly lovely note. 

Andrew Scott delivers a powerful performance as a grief-stricken rideshare driver seeking revenge against a social media company called Smithereen. He takes an employee (Damson Idris) hostage as leverage to get the company’s CEO Billy Bauer (a character who was foreshadowed in Bandersnatch and who is played by Topher Grace) on the phone. Their conversation plays out to surprising impact, as Billy acknowledges the flaws of his addictive platform. Scott has attracted the interest of the local police and the piqued the curiosity of the users of Smithereen (the hashtags are a Black Mirror Easter egg library) and the emotive episode ends more ambiguously than would be expected.

Jodie Foster became the first woman to step behind the camera for a Black Mirror episode with this mother-daughter tale. The story follows a protective single mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) as she raises her daughter, whom she had test out an experimental parental tracking device when she was a young girl. Appealing to a generation of children growing up with Find My iPhone and helicopter parenting, the indie movie-like episode questions the lengths a parent will go to keep their child safe, and how long a child can be restrained.

Inspired by those terrifying real-life Boston Robotics “dogs,” “Metalhead” follows Maxine Peake as she flees a relentless four-legged terminator in this black-and-white, 38-minute episode, marking the shortest and first colorless story of the series. Peake’s character is motivated by her human relationships, an emotional story that contrasts heavily to the bleak world laid out for her in the future where human life is sparsely seen and CGI machines are on the hunt for any trace of life. The survival thriller (which contains a “White Bear” Easter egg) is a commentary on society’s reliance on machines overrunning humans, though its simplicity makes it a contained story amid the rest of the season four offerings.

Taking on the reality competition genre, Daniel Kaluuya exists in a sci-fi game-like world where people must exercise in order to earn “Merits” that are used as currency. When he meets a girl (Jessica Brown Findlay), he helps her compete in a televised talent show in hopes that if she wins, she will be able to escape. Taking a closer look at overnight stardom, class systems and a reality star-obsessed culture, the visual feat of an episode was even recreated as an art exhibition in London. It has also been called back as the series has continued, including in season four stories “Black Museum” and “Crocodile.” The episode marks the show’s first usage of the haunting 1964 Irma Thomas song “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand),” which has been reused repeatedly throughout the series.

An episode that evokes the title of a previous video game-based episode (“Playtest”) and is a sequel to another (Bandersnatch, with Will Poulter reprising his game designer character), while also feeling quite a bit like a Stephen King short story. Peter Capaldi is a murderer giving his confession to a pair of detectives and tells a fantastical tale of video game obsession run amuck. “Plaything” shows Black Mirror still doesn’t need grand thematic ambition or high production values to deliver an entertaining hour. (Also, Netflix actually turned the game into a reality.)

“Striking Vipers” does what a Black Mirror story does best by raising morality questions and sparking a larger debate. The action-romance stars two college friends (Anthony Mackie and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who reconnect when a game they used to play called Striking Vipers gets a VR upgrade. The Street Fighter-style fighting game mimics physical sensations and the behavior the pair engage in while in the alternate universe impacts their lives both in and out of the game. The story raises questions about monogamy (Mackie’s wife is play by Nicole Beharie), sexual identity and fluidity.

The show’s first feature-length episode, the pacing of “Hated in the Nation” was the longest of the series before Bandersnatch. Kelly Macdonald stars as a detective who attempts to stop the deaths of people who are being targeted by a social media “game.” The mini-movie takes on cyber-terrorism when robotic bees, used to pollinate the planet amid the insect’s extinction, are hacked and used to carry out the game’s mission. The episode was inspired by Nordic-noir detective thrillers and also contains a key reference to another episode that took on voyeurism, “The National Anthem.”

Named last in Brooker’s season four sequence for a reason, the story contains an Easter egg reference to nearly every single previous episode — proving once and for all that all of these stories do exist in one Black Mirror universe. Keep your eyes peeled for references when a woman (Letitia Wright) visits a secluded museum of techno-horrors run by an expert in the history of all the criminology on display (Douglas Hodge). Once again telling three vignettes within its larger story, “Black Museum” evokes a range of emotions while exploring new hypothetical technologies and digital consciousness.

Charlie Brooker is rather skilled at inventing terrible psychological fates for his characters and “White Christmas” arguably contains his most horrifying outcomes. The extra-long episode starring Jon Hamm aired between seasons two and three and over Christmas when it launched first in the U.K. in 2014. As episodes were migrating over to Netflix, “White Christmas” arrived on delay for U.S. viewers and when it did, it delivered a compilation story that can be similarly seen in season four’s “Black Museum.” Two men harboring secrets who are stuck in a remote cabin share their life stories with one another and the episode plays out with three mini-stories within the larger story from there. The whole is better than the sum of its parts.

A modern-day actress (Issa Rae) becomes trapped in a Casablanca-style classic black-and-white romantic drama where she falls in love with its female lead (Emma Corrin). We were really split on this feature-length episode — is it moving and sentimental, or painfully slow and silly (“romance meter rising!”)? Rae is supposed to be awkward in her virtual environment, but this awkward?

Black Mirror‘s first version of a rom-com, “Hang the DJ” serves as a social commentary on online dating. Singles played by Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole are matched together by a dating system that sets their time together to only 12 hours. The mysterious romantic tale explores human relationships through the endless options and dating cycles people go through in order to find their match. One of the most well-received of the season, due to its unsuspecting ending, the story is one of many in the series (along with “San Junipero” and “White Christmas”) to tackle digital consciousness from a new angle.

With its extra twisty ending, “Playtest” pulls on the heartstrings. The horror romp warns of the near-future dangers of virtual and augmented reality, and the story’s protagonist (Wyatt Russell) is an entirely likable character — a rarity in the Black Mirror world. The episode takes Russell’s character through a techno-fun house, testing both its star and the viewer on what is real and what isn’t. Ultimately, the technologies employed here are not too far off in the future and as it shows, the consequences can be devastating

It took a nearly two-years for Brooker, Jones and the product team at Netflix to bring the streaming giant’s first interactive offering for adults to life in December 2018. The branching-narrative story plays out in choose your own adventure-style, asking viewers to pick between two choice points as protagonist Stefan (Finn Whitehead) tries to achieve his goal of making a top-reviewed interactive game. The meta plot contains trillions of permutations, thanks to Brooker’s unique script, that result in many story paths and multiple endings. The genres range from comic to tragic and a satisfying viewing experience can be anywhere from 90 minutes to two and a half hours (more than five hours of footage was filmed). The groundbreaking offering, directed by “Metalhead’s” David Slade, was praised for its innovation and Netflix has since rolled out additional interactive projects. The ’80s period piece serves as an origin story by showing how TCKR — then Tuckersoft with top gamer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) — began to impact the world of Black Mirror. (He again appears in season seven’s “Plaything.”)

“Bête Noire,” appropriately, enough, is term for “a person or thing that one particularly dislikes.” Siena Kelly stars as an ambitious food researcher whose world is upended by the reappearance of a former schoolmate (Rosy McEwen) who has a unique power and a rather epic grudge. The dark-yet-upbeat tone, by USS Callister helmer Toby Haynes, is pitch perfect (those day-of-the-week title cards are a nice touch), the lead performances are strong (the winning Kelly keeps us rooting for her despite her character’s flaws, while McEwen is wonderfully infuriating) and the ending is a cathartic blast. A real palate cleanser coming directly after the season seven opener “Common People.”

The most eagerly awaited entry of the new season, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” (the title a fun riff on Star Trek: Into Darkness) is, on one hand, a perfectly enjoyable sequel. “Into Infinity” logically picks up where the original left off, with the clone crew led by Cristin Milioti’s Captain Cole struggling to survive in a ruthless open world game, this time pulling their some of their real-world counterparts into their sci-fi adventure hellscape. The cast is a delight (with Milioti fresh off The Penguin and the return of Jesse Plemons — who shows yet again his ability to put an audience instantly on edge). Yet “Into Infinity” doesn’t much expand on the possibilities and horrors of the original episode and suffers a bit by comparison. That first “Callister” — perhaps the most re-watch friendly of all Black Mirror episodes — has such an extraordinary script and a far greater sense of peril. Still, we’re down for a trilogy. 

Bryce Dallas Howard, set against a pastel palette, lives in a near-future world where everyone is rated on a scale of 1 to 5. With her 4.2-rating, her character is obsessed with climbing up the ladder in a society that awards those with the highest ratings the best of life’s offerings. A commentary on social media and those who use it, versions of the seemingly far-off technology were quickly seen popping up across the world today, not to mention ranking systems utilized by popular technology apps like Uber and Postmates. The episode was written by Rashida Jones (who went onto star in the next episode on this list) and Michael Schur.

Clever, topical and utterly brutal. The seventh season comes out of the gate hard with its darkest episode of the new batch. “Common People” stars Chris O’Dowd and Tracee Ellis Ross as a lovely happily married couple who fall prey to misfortune and sinister machinations of Rivermind, the streaming service from hell, which keeps you alive through ever-worsening deal terms. A savvy pitch-dark parody of streaming services and gig economy struggle, the episode is only held back by its relentless grimness that make it an hour to be endured as much as enjoyed (still, we would love to get a burger after work at the Juniper).

Paul Giamatti is such a refreshing casting as his usual on-screen presence feels like a guy who seems like he has no interest in being in a Black Mirror story and comes across rather put out by the prospect. In “Eulogy,” a bitter recluse is forced to explore his most painful romantic relationship after his ex passes and he receives a device to forensically explore their memories. Echoes here of “The Entire History of You” and the episode doesn’t let its technology, or twist, get in the way of a devastating human story.

The most devastating (and best) episode of season six is a feature-length sci-fi tale about two astronauts (Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett) on a years-long mission who take time outs from their monotonous duties by shifting their consciousness into their replica bodies back on Earth. But what happens when one of those bodies gets murdered? An increasingly unsettling story which hurls towards a tragic outcome that haunts you for days. (Paul also has a voice cameo in “USS Callister”).

One of a handful of Black Mirror‘s romances, “Be Right Back” tells the story of a woman (Hayley Atwell) whose boyfriend (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. While in mourning, she enlists a new technology that can create an AI version of her loved one, putting him back together by his social media footprint and information found online. The touching story explores grief, how people linger on through their online presence after death and the difficulty of letting go, especially when an android can fulfill, and essentially rewrite, a relationship that has been lost. The episode was directed by Owen Harris, who later returned to direct “San Junipero” and “Striking Vipers.”

A fan favorite that’s a bit more Twilight Zone than Black Mirror: A woman with amnesia (Lenora Crichlow) wakes up to find herself in a nightmare scenario, as she appears to be prey to “hunters,” humans who have no remorse and who are controlled by a television signal. A commentary on many aspects of society — from the media to violence and human empathy — the ending shows just what Brooker is capable of along this Black Mirror ride, and is a story that tends to stick with those who make it through. The symbol of the episode was evoked in the branching narrative tale of Bandersnatch and Crichlow’s character, Victoria Skillane, along with Prime Minister Callow (from below’s “National Anthem”), is one of the most referenced characters in the universe.

The Emmy-winning episode was designed to come as a surprise. Before winning the TV trophy, “San Junipero” became an instant cultural phenomenon, thanks to its neon palette, addictive ’80s soundtrack and story between lovers, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis. In an alternate place called San Junipero, Kelly (Mbatha-Raw) helps Yorkie (Davis) accept her sexuality and the star-crossed love story plays out to the tune of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” (rarely has a song been so perfect to a story). The story, the first one Brooker wrote when the series jumped to Netflix, was praised for its LGBTQ storyline and, of course, its unexpected twist. The episode’s last minute of footage, largely playing over the ending credits, is the finest ending in the series. It also introduced TCKR technology later used across the show’s universe.

The first Black Mirror episode to air on Channel 4, “The National Anthem” is perhaps not the best story to indoctrinate viewers into Brooker’s universe as it doesn’t have a technological hook. The political satire is polarizing, and if it’s viewed as a turnoff, it serves as a reminder that this series isn’t for the faint-hearted. It also forces the viewer to confront an impossible hypothetical scenario, which is the Black Mirror DNA. When a member of the British royal family is taken hostage, the only way U.K. Prime Minister Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear) can save her life is if he satisfies the kidnapper’s outrageous demand to have sex with a pig on live television. The prescient episode, infamous in the Black Mirror universe, along with PM Callow, has been referenced in many subsequent episodes and is commonly referred to as “Piggate.”

The epitome of a Black Mirror episode (and yet, oddly enough, one of the few not written by Charlie Brooker, but rather Succession creator Jesse Armstrong). “The Entire History of You” best displays what paranoid humans are capable of when technology is in their hands. Introducing a now-common Black Mirror gadget, a man (Toby Kebbell) questioning if his wife (Jodie Whittaker) has been faithful uses an implant in his temple to revisit their memories, which have been recorded to have the ability to played over as “re-do’s.” The story spawned think-pieces and a believable future reality worth exploring. Two years after the twisted love story originally aired on Channel 4, Robert Downey, Jr. even optioned the episode to be made into a film with Warner Bros. (though no updates have been announced).

The feature-length space epic that sparked the first-ever sequel (in season seven) stars Jesse Plemmons as a CTO to a virtual reality gaming company. The Emmy-winning episode contains homages to Star Trek (and Star Wars) as it charts a journey aboard fleet USS Callister — a spaceship was actually created on the London set — and also stars Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson and Michaela Coel (who also appeared in “Nosedive”). The episode’s whip-smart script manages to dizzyingly satire and critique so many things — classic sci-fi, toxic fandom, workplace harassment, gaming — and somehow does it all at once. Wit cinematic feats, Easter eggs and cameos, the 74-minute sci-fi story continues to strike a chord with viewers for its empowering theme of reclaiming power under tyranny.